Thursday, April 18, 2013

Where has the time gone?

It's been a MONTH since my last post?! Wow. It has definitely been a crazy couple of weeks. Right after I posted we had two of the craziest, busiest weeks we have had in a long time. Then is was Easter and then my kids got the week long nasty stomach bug (over my birthday!) that, between them, took us almost 2 weeks to get over. I am in NO hurry to do that again. I am STILL playing catch up trying to get everything cleaned!

  Last time I posted I had set some goals for myself.

Paint the living room- check (almost) there is one little spot above the molding where I can't reach. Hubby's Turn!

Paint the dining room table- ehh- not exactly. I did paint but it needs another coat.

Get the old dining room table on craigslist- CHECK! It sold in a day! Such a relief to have that much less furniture in the house.

The living room is SO much brighter now that it is painted. I will have update pictures soon! We haven't been up to much in the last 4 weeks.

One thing I have accomplished in this last week in between all the cleaning is that I FINALLY made our neighbor's baby quilt. They had a little boy at the end of January and I finally just finished it this week! They did not find out what they were having so they did their nursery in a neutral woodland theme. Which gave me this idea.
 
I am in LOVE with this quilt. Aleena told me it was "awesome." That is very high praise from her indeed! I needed to figure out how to do it (Pinterest!) and I basically followed this tutorial (which is actually for a pillow) but turned it into a baby quilt instead.  I purchased some simple white cotton fabric and some cute flannel from Joann's. I wanted to do the leaves in a bunch of different fabrics so I wracked my brain and ended up on Etsy buying someones scraps that they were selling in color bundles. I bought their brown and green. One of the green fabrics had the larger size birds so I used one of those and the same material I used for making the tree "hollow" I used for the bird's nest. I learned that Heat n Bond is not really my friend. But it was a good learning experience. I did not use batting in this quilt but the flannel back still makes it pretty cozy. The sewing that I did to secure the leaves was my quilting action so there wasn't any extra sewing and then I just used the flannel backing and wrapped it around and used it to edge the quilt. I just think this quilt is SO fun! It was a lot more work than I anticipated though!


 I also did get to do a little shopping. Remember when I talked about shopping the house? I had had my heart set on a striped basket like the one Miss Mustard Seed had found at Home Goods.


Well my parents checked their Home Goods (the closest one to us is an hour away) and all the ones they found were $50. So I had decided to use my olive basket- when I got a liner made- instead. Well guess what! I was at TJ Maxx with Aleena and the very same baskets that my parents found for $50- I found one for $20! I can do $20. And it holds all our blankets fabulously.


Plus it's too tall for the kids to sit in. You may be wondering what that has to do with it but imagine a vintage wicker laundry basket(what we were using) that 3 kids like to lay in because it's the perfect height for them... yeah it's going to get destroyed pretty fast. That was part of the reason the old one had to go. And I have other plans for the olive basket! My other find was a clock for our eventual desk area in the living room.


I am loving adding pops of red into our living room! This guy was only $12 at TJ Maxx. Now TJ Maxx isn't as good as Home Goods but they have been doing ok for me!

I am working on a desk area for our living room for a couple of reasons.

1. Everything needs to have a place. We have been here a year and I feel like I am JUST starting to get organized.
2. I want my dining room table to be a dining room table and not a desk. This is a lot like reason number one but our disorganization is starting to drive both the Hubs and I crazy. So I have been really focused on trying to sort through things and purge and organize. I am 100% certain there is another yard sale in our future.



I think I mentioned that my lovely MIL is coming to visit us at the end of June. (Yay!) We are so excited she is coming to visit! The kids are excited to see Grandma Jill  (and we are too!)  plus the fact that she is an amazing artist and she is going to make some things beautiful while she is here. Wait until you see!!! We also have the hubs best friends coming for a visit in August.  So I am feeling the pressure (only the kind I put on myself) so have things much further progressed than they are now. Here is what I would LIKE to have accomplished before June 20th.

1. Curtains in the Living Room. I have our old dining room curtains in there now but WAIT until you see the fabric we picked out. I just have to sew them. Trip to Joann's is in my future.
2. Kitchen Cabinets. If you are thinking , "Didn't you already paint the kitchen cabinets?"  Check out that link and notice there are no doors. We are going to leave the cabinets to the sides of the sink as open shelving. I wood puttied holes and everything when I painted them back in November. The other cabinets need their doors so we don't have to look at all the not so pretty stuff. However those are still blue. So some paint is needed!
3. Kitchen Hardware- still have no drawer pulls and if we put the doors back on we will need handles for sure.
4. Finish the empire dresser.You can read about that here
5. Refinish another leaf or two for the dining room table. Our table came with 3 leaves but I haven't touched any of them and more people means we need more room!
6. Maybe paint the kitchen?

This list could get really long. So I will have to keep you updated and from what is on it already I had better get to work!

~Rosemary